1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to information processing apparatuses, information processing methods, and information storing media.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally and continuingly, there has been an apparatus or method where an image or image related information is embedded in a digital image as digital watermark information so that information or related information of the image embedded as the digital watermark information is obtained at the time when the image is read.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 describes a method for accessing a home page having a step in which information equipment reads an image including a URL having an electronic watermark form, a step in which the information equipment transmits the image to a server, a step in which the server extracts a watermark from the image to acquire the URL, and a step in which the server transmits the URL to the information equipment.
According to this method, it is possible to access a home page associated with an image based on the image read by a camera.
Furthermore, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286 describes an image communication system wherein a duplicate image generation program generates a duplicate image file from an original image file, and the ID of the duplicate image file is embedded as image in the duplicate image file. The relationship of the ID of the duplicate image file and the original image is registered in a correlating relationship table. When an image communication server program receives a request from an image communication client program, it extracts the ID of a duplicate image file from the request.
It refers to the correlating relationship table and specifies the original image having a correlated relationship with the ID of the duplicate image file. Information related to the original image file is generated based thereon and is transmitted to the image communication client.
In addition, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-341498 describes a method for re-digitizing an analog document, wherein an input digital document is converted into printing image information and the digital document information is embedded in the printing image information as digital watermark information by electronic watermark technology.
In this method, the printing image information containing the embedded electronic watermark information is printed as an analog document and converted into a digital image and the digital document which is the embedded electronic watermark information is detected from the digital image and output.
Furthermore, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-233873, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 6-4704, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 7-37036, and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 7-73271 describe related techniques.
However, in the techniques described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286, when the information is obtained based on the watermark information obtained by the client or the like, access to the URL or request to the server is made. Therefore, means for connecting to an external device such as a network interface is necessary for the client. It is not discussed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286 that such connection means does not exist. In addition, even if such a connection exists, if the communications status is not good, information cannot be obtained.
Furthermore, in the technique described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249, since the server extracts the digital watermark information, if communication is impossible or difficult, the URL information that is an address of an object of communication cannot be obtained.
In addition, in the techniques described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286, even if the client or the like is connected to the external device and the communication status is good, in a case where the information obtained from the server or the like is image data or the like, the amount of the information is large so that communication time or cost for communications is large. However, this is not considered in the techniques described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286.
On the other hand, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-341498, since the digital information corresponding to the analog document is stored in the analog document as the digital watermark information, there is no need to provide the communication means including the network interface as described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-259249 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-76286. Therefore, there is no need to consider the communication cost for obtaining the information.
However, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2000-341498, the amount of information to be embedded as the digital watermark information is not considered. For example, in a case where the information to be embedded as the digital watermark information is relatively small, this may not be a problem. However, in a case where a large amount of data is embedded, degradation of quality of the embedded image of the analog document becomes large or an amount of the data that can be embedded becomes larger than the amount of the image data to be embedded.
Here, the small amount of data is, for example, text data, small image data, data of a small image and having a small number of colors, or the like. The large amount of data is, for example, full color image data or data of an image having a large angle of view, or the like.
In addition, as a method for adding the information to the analog document, there is a method wherein the information is converted into a designated image code or the like so as to be added in addition to embedding as the digital watermark information. Even if the image code or the like is used, the amount of the data to be added is limited. Therefore, it is difficult to add a large amount of data such as the date of the image to the document as the additional information.